Les enfans sans abri

25 years of laughter

Our next performance, The Grand Inquisitor by Marguerite de Navarre, will be at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference. The play, in staged reading, will be performaed on Saturday, March 24, 2018 at 11:00 am at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.
As always, more details on our Performances page!

Our performance of The Saintly Mister Louse at the Annual Conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies on February 9, 2018, left everyone itching for more!

Saint Martin and the Peasant and The Knight of Enchantment were big hits at the UCLA CMRS conference on "The Comic Supernatural," April 21-22, 2017!
Check out the pix on our media page.

The sermon joyeux The Saintly Mister Louse and the farce The Joyous Farce of Martin de Cambrai performed for Le cercle français de CSU Fresno were a big hit! We were swarmed by students at the end (who asked great questions!). More pix of the evening on the media page.

Stricken was a great success on Friday, February 10, 2017 for the Annual Conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The audience was itching with delight over our performance of The Saintly Mister Louse (complete with song and dance) for the SITM Conference / Theatrum Mundi Festival in Durham, UK (July 11, 2016). See Media for pictures....

We really hammed it up at the ACMRS Annual Conference in February 2016 with our performance of the sermon joyeux Brother Ham and Sister Sausage!

The Getty Iris noted the significance of food-based comedy (art, literature, and performance) in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Les Enfans helps modern audiences savor the past!

Our two performances on April 10 & 11, 2015 for the conference, Re/Creations: Text and Performance in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe at UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies were huge successes!

Another epic performance for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: our February 6, 2015 performance of Tinker, Cobbler, Tavernkeeper. We made it on the cover of ACMRS News; for medievalists, this is like making the cover of Rolling Stone!

Our Saturday, September 20, 2014 performance of A Knight To Remember: The Chivalrous Tale of Gillion de Trazegnies at the Getty was great! A big thank you to everyone that made it so successful! We got a lovely review!

*

Since 1989, the ad hoc medieval / Renaissance troupe Les enfans sans abri (LESA) has been performing comedies all over southern California, in Arizona and New York, even in Europe. We focus on short French and Spanish plays in translation that haven't gotten as much press as Shakespeare, but that are a LOT easier to take on the road.

We perform much as traveling troupes in 16th-century Europe would have done-with nothing more than a few important props, costumes that are authentic re-creations of medieval clothes, no backdrops and little furniture, and a limited play space. The performers are drawn from a pool of people who act when they can and who know how ribald, edgy, and often timely the comedy of 500+ years ago can be..

With no physical base to call our home, we are "les enfans sans abri": wandering waifs unafraid of making sport of human foibles. We inhabit the characters and comical situations of 15th-17th-century Europe: sparring husbands and wives, bumbling servants, gossipy neighbors, licentious priests, conniving lawyers, and assorted other rogues of the middle and lower classes. With every performance, we are reminded that what made people laugh back then still does now.